Just bridekidding

1400 23 March 2009

After two weeks away from site, first at the Peace Corps Program and Design Management seminar and then the Diversity Week in Naryn, I am finally back in site just in time to enjoy a week off of school! It will have been three weeks since I last taught when we get back into the classroom, I hope I didn’t forget everything I knew! I celebrated Nooruz, a pre-Islamic Turkic spring holiday that is one of the biggest festivals in Kyrgyzstan, in Naryn with some other volunteers and an American tourist that I met there. The celebration consists of concerts throughout the county, eating traditional Kyrgyz food, and in some places the national horse games. While I have viewed riders preparing for the horse games, there were none in Naryn city (there are a few national horse games, the most interesting and famous being Ulak tartysh in Kyrgyz, known as buzkhashi elsewhere, an ancient, intense and violent game dating back to the Golden Horde where mounted riders try to pick up a beheaded goat carcass and deposit it into one of two goals using whatever means possible. It is often referred to as the most dangerous sport in the world as fatalities are not uncommon (and even expected) at the brutal international championships in Tajikistan- Usually the Tajik or Kyrgyz win, but the Afghans are renown for their bravery and frowned upon practice of playing with AK-47s). I was disappointed to not be able to see the horse games on Nooruz but have heard that they are played throughout the spring and summer and so I hope to catch a match at some point during the summer, I promise to upload pictures of the carnage then.

I was surprised and for a bit confused and worried this week however when I found out that my host-sister had been bride kidnapped. I knew that she had been dating one of her former classmates for quite a long time. Her boyfriend being Uyghur, a Muslim Western-Chinese ethnic/cultural/linguistic group, (bride kidnapping is pretty strictly a Kyrgyz/Kazakh) I was worried that some random Kyrgyz guy had kidnapped her non-consensually. I was relieved to find out that this was not the case and that it was indeed her boyfriend who had kidnapped her at the urging of his Kyrgyz friends. While she was unaware that it was going to happen, talking with her about it later made me believe that she was content with the occurrence and she seemed relatively happy in her new life. Bride kidnapping is a complex and controversial issue even here and not something I want to get started talking about in a public forum like this. However, it is often exercised in a cultural manner like with my host sister where the intent to marry was already in place, this I find still a bit off-setting due to my cultural upbringing but have many less intellectual qualms about.